Foresight for risk – using scenarios for strategic risk assessment and management of emergent disaster risk

Abstract

Disaster impacts around the world are increasing with 2011 and 2017 the largest on record in terms of total losses from disasters in recorded history (USD 444billion and USD 341billion, respectively). The reasons for the increase in losses are multiple. Climate change is increasing the likelihood and intensity of several natural hazard types, and as the world’s population and economy grow, and humans increasingly develop in areas exposed to natural hazard (e.g. along rivers, and coastal areas), the values exposed are also rapidly increasing. These multiple factors contribute to the complex nature of disaster risk, which is considered to be the combination of natural hazard intensity and extent, exposure (assets, people, other values), and vulnerabilities of the exposed values to the characteristics of the hazards. This can be considered the risk triangle – hazard, exposure and vulnerability – and each of these factors change into the future impacted by a range of drivers; population and economic change, technology, urbanisation rates, political actions etc. To reduce the impacts of disasters, risk management and reduction activities are designed and implemented, and are typically underpinned by risk assessments. Risk assessments use qualitative and/or quantitative approaches to attempt to characterise the likelihood and impact of disaster types for a region or organisation. Currently, risk assessments do not capture future changes across all dimensions of risk in a manner that provides insight into the strategic threats and opportunities of emergent disaster risks. Therefore, there is a need for approaches to consider realistic degrees of complexity within the disaster risk system and account for the uncertainty in emergent risk. By capturing this within disaster risk assessments, treatment options can be developed and tested that strategically manage these risks over time. This research has developed these approaches and provides three key contributions through the use of foresight, primarily scenarios within disaster risk assessment processes, to support effective policy and investment decision making to reduce future impacts. The thesis is organised around three publications, all contributing to the development of a generic framework which integrates foresight into disaster risk management and specific approaches to develop and use scenarios for strategic risk assessment and management of emergent disaster risk. The first paper (Chapter 2) proposes and demonstrates this generic framework for the incorporation of the principles of foresight into risk assessment and management processes. The second paper (Chapter 3) focuses on the design of scenarios to support policy making for disaster risk reduction through several improvements to the methodological approach for constructing relevant and challenging scenarios using an “outcomes of interest” framing. The third paper (Chapter 4) outlines and applies an approach for the use of exploratory scenarios within quantitative disaster risk assessment through the development of alternative pathways of disaster risk using scenarios and integrated risk models.